Photographer Gilcan Mete Delibay is the Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of this photo essay. From the project ‘Dreams of The Cities’. To see Gilcan ’s body of work, click on any photograph.

Cities are areas we inhabit, composed of fixed structures containing streets, parks, and schools. Within the cities we live in, we accumulate memories over the years, experience many emotions, and shape our identity through psychological and sociological experiences. We see cities not as they are, but as we feel them. When buildings and streets shed their rigid reality and transform into layers of emotion, cities resemble our dreams.

Although cities may appear as static, immobile structures and objects, they are structures colored, painted, adorned, renewed, or aged by the dreams, hopes, and fears of the people who live within them. Because cities are not fixed; they are organisms that breathe, vibrate, develop, collapse, renew, and sometimes tremble. The irregular movements in my camera are an attempt to capture the city’s pulse. Every tremor is a heartbeat of mine. Every blur is the visual trace of thoughts passing before our eyes.

The colors in my photographs become emotional spectrums in this series. Surreal tones reveal the city’s suppressed desires, forgotten memories, and hopes seeping from the future. Just as a dream is colored not by logic but by emotion, cities exist through their colors.

The camera’s movement in different directions is an effort to give life to these structures, to awaken them. Every building is an indicator of the collective subconscious of the people living, working, loving, and grieving within it.

In the first light of morning, a city awakens along with people who have digested millions of dreams throughout the night. These photographs pursue that moment when the city has just emerged from its dreams, in that transitional state of not yet being fully awake.

The chaos of movements in my photographs seeks not aesthetics but the inquiry of existence. The disorder is, in fact, the honest expression of cities. Through the distortion created by the camera’s tremor, we experience, by looking at the city, the traces of the dreams we think about all day but cannot recall. These movements are projections of the city’s psychological map.

“Dreams of the City” is an invitation I extend to the viewer to look at the emotional layers lying beneath the city’s visible surface, to experience the city not as a place but as a state of mind.

We do not live in cities; cities live within us. And just like dreams, they are experiences that blur just as we try to focus on them, yet they shape our reality, nonetheless.

These photographs are not the dreams of cities; they are merely our own dreams seen through the cities.

Gılcan Mete Delibay

Born in 1968, Bachelor of photography and videography, founder of “Düşler Atölyesi” photography club and photography teacher. He took part in various photography exhibitions in Turkey. He held 3 personal exhibitions and gave lectures in many universities, colleges, high schools and various corporate associations and meetings.

He likes to tell stories with photography projects and presentations.

He won the Sami Güner Cup, one of Turkey's most important photography events, 3 years in a row.

All images and text © Gilcan Mete Delibay